Alternatives
Products that do what I revived a game I abandoned 5yo ago and released it for free today does
- 1AF
I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam:…
2022
- 26M
2013 · playadrift.com
- 3IG
I was at FB/Meta from late 2013 to early 2023, mostly working in the compiler/runtime spaces. I got hit in the spring 2023 layoff wave. I immediately started making games in my newfound free time (a lifelong interest, and I even worked in AA(A?) back ca. ~2000), and in October 2023 I stumbled upon the idea of a roguelike pachinko/plinko game inspired by Luck Be A Landlord. Things snowballed quickly, I started talking to publishers, then worked like crazy through all of 2024, almost the hardest I've ever worked in my career, and launched the game in December 2024. It's sold…
2025
- 4IS
2012 · ektomarch.com
- 5MM
Hey folks, About a year ago my wife and I, both closing in on 40, quit our jobs at Red Hat to start a games company and learn game development. Many things happened along the road, and about a week ago we released our first (small) game on Steam. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2816120/Mazelit/ The demo is free to play up to level 8 (the final game plays up to level 80) and we'd appreciate any feedback you have, whether it's for the store page or the game itself. We made the game in Godot 4.2 in roughly 3 months and I was working full time next to it. Since…
2024
- 6IO
2021 · github.com
- 7RA
2024 · wheybags.com
- 8IM
2020 · victorqribeiro.itch.io
- 9LG
2014 · lifegoesongame.com
- 10IM
Hi, I've been developing an HTML5 MMORPG game where people can submit code to play a game, like collect items, destroy defense towers or kill monsters, etc.. I've been working on this for over 1.5 yrs (all my spare time) and now it's ready for preview, does anyone want to try it out? It's mostly opensource (and the rest will be opensource sooner or later) Please access it with PC, it's an HTML5 game: https://bytelegend.com/ I really want it to expand to more languages, but right now I've only finished Java part. I wonder if anyone can help me with other languages. Besides, I'm…
2022 · bytelegend.com
- 11AD
This is something that I've been working on on-and-off in my spare time for the last few years. I started in 2020 during Covid trying to do a Mount and Blade style map in UE4, and it grew from there until where it is now - I would just add a feature, then another, until it came together. Since the start of the year I've really been trying to polish it some more. I've got the full thing planned for a Q3 25 release. Github release if you don't have Steam: https://github.com/joe-gibbs/fall-of-an-empire-release
2024 · store.steampowered.com
- 12IS
Hey everyone! Long time lurker, first time poster. I've just reached beta in my game BoxByte Lyte. -What is it- It's a free 3d arcade game for hardcore players that uses color matching in interesting ways. Also it's a one button game, well movement and one button. Cool huh? The final release will be free too. -What I need- This is a very challenging game, so I really need to balance the difficulty so that it's still hard but not impossible. It would be great just to hear your experiences of the game and how far in it you got. -Where can I report bugs?-…
2015
- 13SSpiderdash▲42
I made this game ten years ago without framework. It took my free time for months to develop. I find myself having fun playing it today. Maybe some will enjoy
2023 · spiderdash.standupweb.net
- 14IJ
2011 · codebrief.com
- 15IB
Dear Hacker News, I'm kindly asking for your participation in the open beta for my AI-managed mini-games website. Thank you in advance! For a limited time window, I'm setting the all-free feature flag to true. I hope you have a lot of fun exploring the AI's sense for games! Here and there, I tweaked it to help with visual consistency. I would be deeply grateful if you opted into analytics. $2,300 in API tokens... Cheers!
Jun 2026 · minigames.world
- 16MA
A few months ago (82 days to be exact!) I posted a link on HN to my game, Meatshields. A bunch of you commented and played my game and gave me some wonderful feedback. Over the last few months I've been playing with many of you and implementing the best of everybody's suggestions. So, thank you, HN for all your help! I feel this is an extreme overhaul I couldn't have done without your input. Since then, I have: Dramatically improved our hosting platform (So it HOPEFULLY won't go down this time (oops.)), Added two new units, Rebalanced all existing units, Added many more maps, Improved the…
2017
- 17AG
2013 · itunes.apple.com
- 18IL
I am a 50-year-old who left a FAANG Engineering Manager job to build a sci-fi game. I just released Outsider, a sci-fi narrative game with multiple endings. If you want to support my work, the game is now 15% off (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/). I've always wanted to create a game. I moved from Brazil to the US to work at Big Tech, but after a career of customer focus, mission alignment and 360-degree feedback, I wanted to experience solo game development. While FAANG can be soul-crushing at times, I had a great manager and an amazing team. The pay and…
Nov 2025
- 19IR
It took me 20 months to develop it in my spare time. I used Unity game engine, I did not have any game dev experience before. It was more complex that I thought at the begining, I spent lots of time on promotion, marketing, founding company, learning about the legal aspects of different parts, for example music. Some parts were easier than I expected. Unity makes it very easy to build for all three operating systems (Win, MacOs, Linux), I am not sure why more game devs are not using this possibility. I also like working on Steam as distribution system. It is not exactly easy for a newcomer,…
2022 · store.steampowered.com
- 20
- 21IP
Site seems to be getting hammered, so here's a direct link to the demo: http://hildr.luminance.org/Lumberjack/Lumberjack.html
2012 · luminance.org
- 22MG
2018 · steam250.com
- 23SF
Hi HN! I’ve been building a 2D game using a custom engine I wrote from scratch – no Unity, no frameworks. It’s fully self-funded and will be released commercially on Steam. Engine source code (MIT): http://github.com/willtobyte/carimbo I’d love feedback on the gameplay, visuals, performance, or anything else. Thanks!
2025 · bereprobate.com
- 24IR
Recently, I managed to recover some of my earliest work from the ZX Spectrum era from an old audio cassette. It is a mini-game, that I created as a teen, called "Atomix," written in BASIC with a mix of Z80 assembly — some of which I coded myself, while other parts were disassembled from existing games. I put the game in an modern emulator and recorded a screencast. See the video in my linkedin post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7288665...
2025
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